Understanding Personality & Values

• Personality is the culmination of how someone reacts and interacts with others.
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Big Five Model are personality frameworks.
• The concepts of core self-evaluation (CSE), self-control, and proactive personality help in understanding personality.
• Personality plays a role in job search.
• Situations can affect the prediction of behavior through personality.
• Terminal and instrumental values are distinct.
• Person-Job-Fit and Person-Organisation-Fit differ.
• Hofstede's value dimensions can be compared with the GLOBE framework.

Personality

• Personality is how an individual reacts to and interacts with others.
• Personality traits are enduring characteristics describing an individual's behavior.
• Consistent and frequent characteristics are more important in describing someone's personality.

Factors Influencing Personality

• Personality arises from nature/heredity
• Factors determined at conception include physical stature, facial features, gender, temperament, muscle composition, reflexes, energy level, and biological rhythms.
• Personality arises from nurture/environment, such as culture, family norms, friends, and social groups.

Personality Measurement

• Personality tests aid managers in hiring decisions and predicting job success.
• Self-report surveys, where individuals evaluate themselves, are the most common method.
• Observer-ratings surveys involve coworkers or other observers providing ratings.
• Combining self-reports and observer reports can provide a comprehensive assessment.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

• MBTI classifies people into 1 of 16 personality types based on four characteristics.
• The MBTI is based on Carl Gustav Jung's type theory.
• Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Myers published the test in 1944.
• The MBTI is among the most widely used personality assessment instruments.
• MBTI has 4 classifications: Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I), Sensing (S) or Intuitive (N), Thinking (T) or Feeling (F), Judging (J) or Perceiving (P).
• The MBTI has been found to not be a valid instrument for predicting personality.
• Difficulties include forced choice, reliability of measure, difficulty of interpretation, and results unrelated to job performance.
• MBTI can increase self-awareness, provide career guidance and benefit team development.

Big Five Personality Model

• The Big Five Model assesses personality across five basic dimensions.
• Test scores can predict behavior in real-life situations.
• Individual test scores tend to stay relatively stable.
• The Big Five factors include: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability (Neuroticism).
• High end Openness to experience: creative, curious, artistically sensitive. Low end: conventional, find comfort in the familiar
• High end Conscientiousness: responsible, organized, dependable, and persistent. Low end: easily distracted, disorganized, and unreliable
• High end Extraversion: assertive, outgoing, sociable, talkative, more freely express their feelings. Low end: more thoughtful, reserved, anxious, and quiet.
• High end Agreeableness: cooperative, warm, and trusting. Low end: cold and antagonistic.
• High end Emotional stability: calm, self-confident, secure, positive and optimistic. Low end: nervous, anxious, depressed, and insecure, vulnerable to stress.
• Less negative thinking, higher job satisfaction, and adaptability to change affects emotional stability
• Better interpersonal skills, higher performance, and enhanced leadership affects extraversion
• Increased learning and enchanced training affects openness
• More compliant and higher performance affects agreeableness
• Greater effort and persistence and enhanced leadership affects conscientiousness

Dark Triad

• Negative personality traits of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy.
• They don't always present together.
• Traits are strongly expressed when stressed.
• High levels can derail careers and personal lives.
• Machiavellianism: being pragmatic, maintaining emotional distance, believing ends justify means, and having manipulative tendencies.
• Narcissism: arrogance, exaggerated self-esteem, need for admiration, and a sense of entitlement.
• Psychopathy: lacking compassion, concern for others, guilt, or remorse, but willing to take risks and seek thrills.
• Narcissists: motivated by admiration
• Machiavellian: Wants to achieve their goals and strives for power
• Psychopaths: motivated the action itself and the thrill.

Other Personality Traits

• Core Self-Evaluations: Conclusions indidivuals have about their capabilities, competences and their worth as a person
• Self-Monitoring: the personality trait of measuring an idividual's ability to adjust his or her behaviour to external, situational factors
• Proactive Personality: identify opportunities, show initiative, take action and persists until meaningful change is achieved

Situation Strength Theory

• Personality translates into behavior depending on the situation's strength.
• Situation strength is the degree to which norms, cues, or standards dictate appropriate behavior.
• Situation strength depends on clarity, consistency, constraints, and consequences.
• Clarity: work duties are available and clear.
• Consistency: cues regarding work duties are compatible.
• Constraints: individual freedom is limited by external forces.
• Consequences: decisions or actions impact the organization and its stakeholders.
• It's not always desirable to create strong situations for various reasons.
• Organization rules influence a person's response to the situation's strength.
• Jobs with excessive rules can be dull or demotivating.
• Strong situations can suppress creativity, initiative, and discretion.
• In strong situations, individuals conform to expectations.
• In weak situations, individuals act according to personal beliefs.
• Situation strength theory emphasizes considering situational factors to understand and predict behavior.

Trait Activation Theory (TAT)

• predicts "activate" a trait more than others.
• TAT can foresee which jobs suit personalities.

Person–Job Fit

• This theory identifies six personality types.
• Fit between personality type and occupational environment impacts satisfaction and turnover.
• Holland's Typology includes: Realistic, investigative, social, conventional, enterprising and artistic.

Person-Organization Fit

• People seek organizations matching their values, leaving if there's incompatibility.
• Alignment of individual and organizational values, needs, and interests is most effective.
• Person-organization fit boosts commitment, satisfaction, retention, performance, and individual health.
• Extraversion fits aggressive, team-oriented cultures
• Agreeableness fits supportive organizational climates.
• Openness to experience fits innovation-focused organizations

Values

• Basic convictions about preferable conduct or existence.
• Help to know what is socially preferable in terms of conduct
• Forms a hierarchy of an individuals values based on intensity

Values Characteristics

• Values contain a judgmental element regarding what is right, good, or desirable.
• Values possess content and intensity attributes.
• A mode of conduct or end-state's importance is content
• Intensity specifies how important a mode of conduct or end-state is.
• Values are relatively stable, enduring, and learned.
• Values says little about a person’s personality
• Values underlie attitudes and motivation.
• Values can cloud objectivity and influence related attitudes and behavior.
• Terminal values: refer to desirable end-states of existence; the goals a person would like to achieve during his or her lifetime.
• Instrumental values: refer to preferable modes of behaviour or means of achieving one's terminal values.

Value Dimensions of National Culture

• Geert Hofstede’s research.
• Fons Trompenaars' research.
• GLOBE Studies.
• Hofstede's Framework: Includes five value dimensions of national cultures
• Power distance: acceptance of unequal power distribution.
• Individualism vs. collectivism: preference for individual or group action.
• Masculinity vs. femininity: cultural preference for traditional masculine or equal roles.
• Uncertainty avoidance: tolerance for uncertainty.
• Long-term vs. short-term orientation: emphasis on future or present.
• GLOBE studies identifies cultural dimensions
• Performance orientation: group members work to improve the overall performance and excellence
• Assertiveness: how much someone is confrontational and aggressive to others
• Future orientation: how behaviours orient towards the future
• Humane orientation: how collectives being fair, altruistic, generous, caring and kind
• Institutional collectivism: how to reward collective distribution of resources
• In-Group Collectivism: degree to show express pride and cohesiveness in relationships
• Gender Egalitarianism: gender inequality
• Power Distance: community endorses authority, power and status privileges
• Uncertainty Avoidance: how a group relies on social norms, rules to alleviate unpredictability.

The Globe Study

• Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) research program launched in 1993.
• Investigates leadership and national culture cross-culturally.
• Utilizes data from 825 organizations across 62 countries.
• Identifies nine dimensions differentiating national cultures.
• Country scores reflect the present existence and aspired values of each cultural dimension.
• The stated values and observed practices scores often showed variance.
• The degree to which people accept power in their insitutions and organisations is unequally distributed
• Societal wealth generation and distribution is clearly underpinned by culture.